I went to the public lecture; "Muslims in Germany: Conflicting Identities and Difficult Relations" at the UM's Centre for Civilisational Dialogue, half-expecting the speaker to be a German Muslim, and hence prepared with lots of questions. Upon learning his name, I instinctively knew most of my questions I would not ask, for they were meant for a German Muslim. And he's not Muslim. Fine. Some quick thinking and I came up with a different set of questions. Then only that I learnt that he's a professor teaching in Tamkang University, Taiwan. Oh great. But German, nonetheless.
Anyway
I thought the public lecture went OK. It was the part
after the lecture which I find interesting; the QnA, what with the international floor and all (the English were there, at least one Turk, Indonesians, and citizens of whicever countries. Heck, Malaysians were the minority amongst the audience!). There was
at least one other German in the audience, one Mr Andreas; a representative from the German embassy. Because of his active involvement in the QnA session, I thought it was better had
he given the lecture instead.
Apparently (according to the lecture), the general sentiment amongst the (non-Muslim) population in Germany is that; the Muslim culture is one that 'creates an atmosphere that allows the (sic) violence to grow', one that has, or one that has shown 'lack of sympathy with victims' and one where 'condemnations hardly go beyond the necessary minimum' (condemnations of the act(s) and/or the one(s) commiting the act(s), I believe). And Muslims are apparently deemed, in general, anti-modern. And as a (former) great civilisation, 'Muslims haven't reversed the decline of their global status' (note: I state again that these were presented as 'perceptions of the (majority of) non-Muslim Germans', not as facts, by the speaker).
He was grilled by an Indonesian (lecturer? Student?) afterwards.
He was grilled again by Mr Andreas. I think he stopped short of calling the speaker stupid. But just. And it was the speaker who had a PhD to his name. And a professor, to boot (but to be fair it wasn't his area of expertise I think. Else he wouldn't be teaching in Taiwan).
I tried to be as neutral as I can since I was one of the last to get to ask questions (which might be because I looked like a kid and was wearing the kind of clothes that only undergrads would wear -other people came in work clothes mainly and/or looked older. There weren't a lot of students present I believe) and he had been grilled enough, and I thought I asked very moderate questions. Since he spoke of bad relations, and also of violence and crime, I asked "whether 'bad relations' imply violence and crime being committed, or that the various groups with differing faiths merely just never talked to each other?" This he replied very vaguely. To my question on minarets, I thought his answer was laughable. Since the
Swiss have proposed a ban on (masjids with) minarets, I asked "what do the
Germans think of it (what the Swiss had done, the building of minarets in general, etc)?" His answer? "Sometimes we build minarets so that we end up with better looking buildings". Oh well. Did I fail to read between the lines or something or is that a baffling answer? In the end I suggested a few scenarios and he answered with yess and nos. Thank you very much.
Apparently, there had been similar dialogues/conferences/lectures in the past on roughly similar matters (there was one about Muslims in Canada, according to Yati) and there will be more in the future. Will look forward to those.
